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With the airing of last night's action-packed finale, HBO has delivered a gripping climax to its ten-episode Stephen King adaptation, The Outsider. Focusing on a community rocked by a gruesome child murder, the show, like the book, was something of a genre-buster, tipping from police procedural in its first half into full-blown supernatural horror in its second half. Given its steady ratings climb and the finale's post-credits scene, it's possible that HBO will go The Leftovers route with The Outsider and continue the series with new stories beyond the scope of King's novel. The mythology at play in the narrative might even allow the network to anthologize it, adopting a new cast and setting in its second season, as AMC did last year with its Dan Simmons adaptation, The Terror.
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Instead of pulling a True Detective and downplaying it at the end, The Outsider went all-in on the supernatural, playing up its Mexican boogeyman, El Cuco, in a progressive manner as the season wore on. In the finale, it even showed us a couple of cave-dwelling ghosts, right before the protagonist, Ralph Anderson, doubled back and smashed the monster's head in with a rock. Let the record show that the monster lay impaled by a stalactite at the time.
This is just one example of a scene that played out differently in the book. King's novel had Jack waking up from a nightmare to find his mother's putrified, talking corpse in bed next to him. There was also a Shining-esque scene in the book where Jack encountered the Outsider in his bathroom, watching in horror as the shadowy figure in the tub curled its tattooed fingers around the shower curtain. The show offered up a different riff on this spooky beat in the moment when the Outsider's hand reached up from the back seat in Jack's car as he was driving.
One of the most impactful changes the show made was to give Ralph Anderson and his wife, Jeannie, the backstory of parents who had lost a child. In the book, their son was merely off at summer camp, and Ralph never spent a lot of in-scene time in therapy sessions or struggled with a past drinking problem that saw him getting into bar fights. Accused child murderer Terry Maitland still had a history as his son's baseball coach, but the boy was very much alive. Yet his being alive didn't serve much purpose, plot-wise, since he was out of the picture while everything was happening, anyway.
By putting Ralph and Jeannie in a place where they were still grieving over the loss of their own son, the show gave them a more personal stake in the murder of young Frank Peterson. Ralph suddenly had a deeper, more painful personal motivation for sending in officers to arrest Terry Maitland in the middle of a baseball game where the whole town was watching.
Whereas the book had Ralph interacting with Terry's widow more directly at times, the show allowed Jeannie to forge an empathetic bond with her, woman-to-woman, thereby acting as a much-needed go-between. Thrilling and contemplative, even emotional at times, the season finale of The Outsider built on all this character work, culminating in a final pre-credits scene that rang some real pathos out of Ralph's arc. He started out the show as someone who had "no tolerance for the unexplainable." While everyone else around him got on board with the idea of a shape-shifting, child-devouring boogeyman, he remained the lone skeptical holdout.
The HBO adaptation of The Outsider disentangled Holly from Hodges and his adventures, giving her a standalone presence as a private investigator. In the grand tradition of The Shawshank Redemption, which turned a redheaded Irish character named Red into Morgan Freeman onscreen, The Outsider also changed Holly from a grey-haired, older white woman into Erivo's black, braided, old-souled, "neuro-diverse" P.I. In addition, the show invented a new character, Andy (Derek Cecil from House of Cards), to act as a love interest for Holly.
Unfortunately, Andy was one of several fatalities in the parking lot shootout that kicked off the thrilling climax of The Outsider this week. The show fleshed out her relationship with Andy's killer more, giving her some quality time with Jack in the car, a few episodes earlier, as he attempted to abduct her. This caused Jack to hesitate while he was looking down the barrel of his sniper rifle at her this week. It was the impetus for him to take back control of himself from the Outsider and surrender himself to a rattlesnake attack.
Who knows, maybe some viewers who are tougher critics were as underwhelmed by HBO's The Outsider as I was with the book's ending. If the show had any weakness, it might be that it wasn't completely smooth about shifting gears into the supernatural. The book arguably suffered from the same weakness. It had Holly show her fellow investigators scenes from a B-movie called Mexican Wrestling Women Meet The Monster, whereupon Yune Sablo, the state policeman of Mexican descent, drew an immediate link to an old story that his "wife's abuela told her when she was just pequena."
The show's version of Yune was thankfully less of a Spanglish caricature, but if I were Ralph Anderson, sitting in with everybody on Holly's big presentation, listening to her introduce El Cuco as the new prime suspect in the Frank Peterson murder, I'm not sure I would be convinced, either. In the show, Holly was exposed to the El Cuco story by the mother of a prison inmate who overheard her interviewing one of the people caught up in a pattern of previous murders matching the Frank Peterson M.O. It did seem like some of the other characters were too quick to accept this random old folk tale as a viable explanation for what was going on with Terry Maitland and the conflicting evidence surrounding him.
Minor qualms aside, HBO's The Outsider proved to be another in a long line of winning King adaptations that we've seen in recent years, as the author's work has undergone something of a screen renaissance. The show reached a satisfying conclusion before it cut to credits; then it snuck in a little extra tease, with Holly Gibney reappearing, seeing Jack in the mirror, and checking the back of her neck for the telltale boils that would indicate she's becoming the Outsider's new familiar. There were no boils, but when the camera panned over to show the scratch on Holly's arm, it seemed to suggest that the cycle of evil might continue.
As the finale fades from memory, we'll soon go back to life outside The Outsider. For yours truly, as a reader and viewer (technically, listener and viewer), the show improved upon the book and struck just the right balance between mystery, horror, thrills, and good old-fashioned drama.
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Intuitively, killing the surprise seems like it should make a narrative less enjoyable. Yet research has found that having extra information about artworks can make them more satisfying, as can the predictability of an experience. So Christenfeld decided to put spoilers to the test in the most straightforward way possible: by spoiling stories for people.
Will this finding make people rush out and look for spoilers? Almost certainly not. Despite the fact that most people have experienced a spoiler enhancing their enjoyment of a story, the vast majority of people still think that spoilers ruin stories in some way.
Per Ehrin, the death was originally "a lot more ambiguous on the page." And it seems this wasn't the only ending the show tried out, as executive producer and director Mimi Leder told Variety that the filmed the scene a couple different ways.
In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Kunis spoke about her return on the series, though she also dropped a significant spoiler while sharing her thoughts on what's in store for Jackie. When we last saw her, Jackie had seemingly broken up with Kelso for good upon discovering Fez to be the one she wanted to be with. As will be revealed in That '90s Show (SPOILER ALERT), Jackie and Fez apparently didn't work out. Kunis says that Jackie has since gotten back with Kelso, and even though she's married to Kutcher in real life, Kunis feels Jackie should have stuck with Fez.
Essentially, the show was about these characters with diaries that could predict the future. And the goal was for all of these characters to fight to the death to become God. The main characters are Yukiteru (introvert) and Yuno (the crazy tsundere) and the whole show follows there exploits as they attempt to win the game over the course of the 26 episode adventure. However, it turns out that Yuno had played the game before in a previous alliteration of their time and had become a God and that universe and transport herself to our world to try and win again such that Yukiteru lives because in the previous one he died.
But anyways, I really like the show. Good story, interesting characters, good animation, great action sequences, and fantastic music, and it was so mind blowing Lee edgy and stupid that it was almost good ironically. However it had character and tone inconsistencies.3.75/5.00 -A decent anime.
Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan is part courtroom thriller, part domestic thriller, and part revenge story. Anatomy of a Scandal has also been adapted into a six-episode drama, streaming now on Netflix. Want a plot summary of Anatomy of a Scandal, a discussion of the book and a comparison of the book to the Netflix show? Welcome to Jen Ryland Reviews and hope you enjoy my Spoiler Discussion and Plot Summary for Anatomy of a Scandal
David Kelley often changes the books he adapts, with Big Little Lies and The Undoing being two examples, so I was expecting more of a change to Anatomy of a Scandal. It seems to me that the show follows the events of the book pretty closely, with only a few changes: 041b061a72